Category: Brazil

The Brazilian samba school: Delivering high performance with happiness!

Management the Brazilian Way

Many foreign corporations dealing with Brazilians complain about low productivity, poor communication, high turnover and lack of engagement. Yet, at samba schools, Brazilian members show the opposite, and for no pay too!

Online course

This is an online course in English addressed to business people who work with Brazilians.

To show what is missing at corporate management Alfredo Behrens has researched and interviewed at samba schools. He has elicited the people management practices and leadership styles that can be implemented at corporations to achieve higher profitability with greater happiness. Much of the course is drawn from subtitled interviews with genuine samba school members and can be easily transferred to corporations, like recruiting, selection and promotion techniques, even compensation ones, though samba schools do not pay members.

High performance with happiness can be achieved in Brazil following the samba school method of management!

The self-paced course is designed for executives. It consists of 14 lectures but they are short: 7 minutes each. They can be fitted between phone calls if necessary. Altogether we are talking of just over one and a half hours of lectures. Each lecture comes with additional reading material and quizzes to measure the participants’ understanding. The course will remain free, for sure, until November 14, when all 14 lectures will have been completed. At present only the wrap-up lecture is missing. But you can fully benefit for free from the rest, 13 out of 14 lectures! That is all there is between you and success!Management the Brazilian Way can be found here. Once there you may click on This course and you will be taken to the course´s landing page, enrol free, no credit card asked, and start learning.

In below video, sponsored by the Dutch Brazilian Chamber of Commerce you will get an idea of the course content.

About Alfredo Behrens

Alfredo Behrens holds a PhD by the University of Cambridge, has taught at Princeton University and is an expert on Cross-Cultural Management and Leadership, which he lectures on at FIA, the São Paulo business school. His book ‘Culture and Management in the Americas’ is published by Stanford University Press. Another book: ‘Shooting Heroes and Rewarding Cowards’ is praised by Suzy Welch, the former Editor-In-Chief of Harvard Business Review as ‘Fascinating and Innovative’.

As emerging powers like China are seeking to strengthen innovation-driven growth and focus on the production of value-added goods, they are increasingly trying to emulate the United States’ unique capacity to attract foreign talent. Indeed, the competition for high-end talent is set to become a major international battleground as nations around the world try to avoid being left behind as eternal commodity providers, unable to achieve long-term growth.

A brief look at the statistics shows the massive impact immigrants have on the US economy’s capacity to innovate and generate jobs: Some 40% of Fortune 500 firms were founded by immigrants or their children. So were the firms behind seven of the ten most valuable brands in the world. Although the foreign-born are only an eighth of the US population, a quarter of high-tech start-ups have an immigrant founder. Apple, Google, AT&T, Budweiser, Colgate, eBay, General Electric, IBM, McDonalds, owe their origin to a founder who was an immigrant or the child of an immigrant. Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, is a child of an immigrant parent from Syria. Walt Disney also was the child of an immigrant (from Canada), as well as the founders of Oracle (Russia and Iran), IBM (Germany), Clorox (Ireland), Boeing (Germany) 3M (Canada) and Home Depot (Russia).

High-tech firms such as Google (whose co-founder Sergey Brin moved to America from Russia as a child) haven’t just created jobs for their own workers. They have also inspired the creation of entirely new categories of job. A few years ago no one earned a living as a mobile-app developer. Now they are everywhere. It is not just full-time workers who benefit: firms such as oDesk, a Silicon Valley outfit founded by two Greeks, are nurturing an online freelance economy that is in its infancy. Last year Americans using oDesk’s platform found over 2 million hours of freelance work.Continue reading

Here is where things stand for Brazil’s major agricultural products at the start of the New Year

Soybeans – a stubborn early drought eventually gave way to adequate rainfall, but too late to maintain the second crop window for some farmers. Conab (Brazilian national supply agency) surprised some by raising the soybean production forecast to 95.8 million tons, based on increased planted acreage and more regular rainfall. The phytosanitary emergency in response to the voracious Helicoverpa caterpillar has been extended in key Brazilian agricultural states. Last year’s soybeans followed by soybeans experiment (soybeans replacing corn as the ‘safrinha’ crop) can be classified as a phytosanitary failure and an economic success, as rust and pests proliferated but farmers earned more from double soybeans than they did from corn. Double cropped soybeans is an unsustainable practice that threatens the Brazilian soybean industry as a whole and it should be banned as soon as possible. Look to the Ministry of Agriculture for leadership on this important issue. The press should be addressing this issue and is not. January 19th Update – The soybean-free phytosanitary period in Mato Grosso has been expanded from 90 to 120 days

Corn – corn production is generally expected to decrease, reflecting an overall smaller ‘safrinha’ crop due to delayed soybean planting driven by early season drought and poor financial prospects for the crop. But hold on to your seats, now the strong dollar is making corn more attractive. Use of corn feedstock as an off-season supplement to sugar cane for ethanol production is increasing in Brazil.

Sugar cane – sector is in deep crisis, driven by subsidized gasoline prices and drought. The current world trend towards lower petroleum prices will likely hurt the sector, but an increase in the mandatory ethanol/gasoline blend to 27% planned for February should help. The first second generation ethanol plant in the country was recently opened by Raizen.

Cotton – worldwide demand for cotton is expected to grow 3.8% in 2014/15, following a 1% decrease in 2013/14. In 2013/14, supply exceeded demand for the fifth consecutive season. 2014 is projected to be the second best year in history for Brazilian cotton exports.

Coffee – Arabica coffee production fell 15.6% this year, due in part to the strong drought at the start of the year. The producing states most affected were Parana (-66.1%) and Minas Gerais (-18.1%). In contrast, robusta production increased by 20%. A weather specialist has warned of new periods of prolonged drought in coffee growing regions of southern Minas Gerais.

Beef – The headline, translated from the Portuguese, reads: “2014 was the best year of all times for Brazilian livestock (cattle)”. Average prices were high and there were gains across the supply chain. 2014 also saw record exports of US $7 billion. The outlook for 2015 is (appropriately) bullish as Brazil takes advantage of the end of embargoes in several markets.

Exports – 2014 was a good year for Brazilian exports, driven by the opening of many markets, including: Russia, Mexico, Japan, South Africa, China, Korea, Colombia, Iraq, Iran, Egypt and Thailand. Prospects for 2015 continue to be bright.

Reprinted with permission of Mark Horn, president at Mark Horn and Associates LLC

Brazilian justice orders removal of YouTube video

Another YouTube video not anymore available for Brazilian viewers

The court in the Brazilian state Ceará ruled that Google Brazil removes a video on YouTube and refrain from placing again this video on their site. The video shows the three businessmen robbing a store in a mall in Fortaleza. In the images, trio is accused of robbing a store in a mall in Fortaleza. The images show the trio removing objects to repossess the property, that was illegally sublet.

In the lawsuit, the three entrepreneurs reported feeling morally harmed, and therefore requested the removal of the video. They further demand that YouTube refrains again to place the video on the network. They also requested Google to show the identity of the user who has uploaded the video on the YouTube network, the IP-address and further identification of the user who placed the video on YouTube. They also asked for compensation for moral damages.

Trio asked Google to remove the videos

In the lawsuit, entrepreneurs explained they heave been having been in contact with Google and YouTube Brazil by phone and email to get the video removed. According to the records, four days later, the General Counsel of YouTube reported that removal should be done by the user who posted the video and said obey whatever decision was determined by the courts.

The court notes in its statement that all jurisprudence assumes that such slanderous videos may not be published, especially when there is not a condemnation of the criminals in a lawsuit. In case of breach of the measure, the daily fine is R$ 3000.

However, after being convicted in the first instance, the Google Internet Brazil filed an interlocutory appeal before the court. The company requested that the injunction was limited the obligation to remove the video from YouTube, finding that “there is no means to carry out the monitoring on the previous content circulating on the Internet.” Also argued not be able to “keep adding new content in YouTube videos and much less clear in third party sites”.

Brazil requests most take down of content

In 2010 Google reported that Brazil was the country with most requests from its government to take down content. In the same year a law was approved that banned political satire on election years.

On 9 August 2011, the Federal Justice of Minas Gerais blocked the distribution of A Serbian Film, a 2010 Serbian horror film, in Brazil. This was the first time a movie was banned in Brazil since the promulgation of the 1988 Constitution. The previously banned film, Je vous salue, Marie a 1985 French film written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard that retells of the story of a virgin birth, was banned in 1986.[21] As of 2012 this decision has been overturned and the film given a “not recommended for those under the age of 18, due to depictions of sex, pedophilia, violence and cruelty” rating.

Arrest of Google’s most senior executive in Brazil

In September 2012 an elections court in Brazil ordered the arrest of Fábio José Silva Coelho, Google’s most senior executive in the country, after the company failed to take down YouTube videos attacking a local mayoral candidate. The stringent 1965 Electoral Code bans campaign ads that “offend the dignity or decorum” of a candidate. Google is appealing the order, which comes after a similar decision by another Brazilian elections judge. In that case, the judge found a different senior executive responsible for violating local election law after the company refused to take down a YouTube video mocking a mayoral candidate. Another judge overruled that decision and wrote that “Google is not the intellectual author of the video, it did not post the file, and for that reason it cannot be punished for its propagation.” Google also defended users’ political rights saying “that voters have a right to use the Internet to freely express their opinions about candidates for political office, as a form of full exercise of democracy, especially during electoral campaigns”.